Collin Poirot - Entry No 5 (Taussig)

Roger Taussig begins his 1984 article “Culture of Terror—Space of Death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” by introducing the concept of the “culture of terror.” For Taussig, a culture of terror is a symbolic and discursive mediation of reality; it is a particular kind of cultural lens that perceives the world as menacing and antagonistic. The problem is that these discursive constructions of “reality” have material implications; even though they might not be “factually correct,” they nonetheless affect us as if they were, and we react accordingly.

The second important concept that Taussig introduces is that of the “space of death.” This space is both symbolic and literal/material – it is the epistemic “murk” that characterizes inter-cultural communication and interaction. It is a discursive space wherein the “truth” of representations cannot be established, and the symbolic imaginary is the only lens available for interpreting/experiencing the world. One example that Taussig gives of this type of “space of death” is the Belgian Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The experience of a Westerner like Marlow in the Congo unfolds entirely within a space of death—an epistemic murk. The environmental and cultural context is so completely foreign and unnerving to Marlow that he has no possible way of “knowing” whether the tales of cannibalism and madness that he is being told are true. Since there is no possibility for epistemic certainty, Marlow’s every action and conception of his environment is mediated through the discursive lens. In the Belgian Congo, as in Putumayo, the only discursive lens available to the western agents is that of “civilization and economics vs. savagery and cannibalism.”

I think that what is most interesting here is Taussig’s inversion of the dominant historiography of colonialism. The colonial encounter is almost always depicted as the indigenous communities being terrorized into submission by the invading powers, who arrive with biological and mechanical technologies of destruction that seem otherworldly, magical, and demonic to the indigenes. In this version of the encounter, the colonizers act out of self-assured superiority and ruthlessly exploit the oppressed subjects. Insofar as the colonial encounter is always a space of death (ie. of epistemic uncertainty), I think Taussig would agree that the indigenes construct their own discursive lens for interpreting and responding to the colonizer, and that that discursive lens is almost always a culture of terror, but I also think Taussig would argue that the colonizers themselves are acting within a culture of terror—they too are terrorized. The colonizers have no way of attaining epistemic certainty or knowledge about the indigenes, and usually attribute a sort of heathen savagery and animalic demonism to them. The colonizers’ discursive construction of the indigene as savage and evil in turn terrifies the colonizers, and causes them to experience the encounter as antagonistic and threatening. In this way, the colonizers’ own perceptions of the indigenes causes them to act in an excessively brutal manner. In Heart of Darkness, Mr. Kurtz’ insanity and brutality is not the result of some calculated capitalist rationale – it is the only affective response that is capable of retaliating against and responding to the imaginary space in which he finds himself. The descent into barbarism and inhumanity that Casement and Hardenburg document is the inevitable affective reaction to the discursively-constructed culture of terror that the colonizers exist in.

To understand what I mean here, it is useful to recall Walter Benjamin’s concept of the phantasmagoria. The shadowy images produced by the phantasmagoric machine (in this case the imagery of cannibals and savage indigenes, which are produced by the optic lens, the brain, and the narrative) are perceived as real to the subject living inside the phantasmagoria. The subject responds to these shadows as if they were real because it experiences them as real.

The crucial question then becomes “how do we undermine the discourses that reify the cultures of terror which give rise to inhumane brutality?” The dominant method of constructing counter-discourses has been to emphasize and rely upon scientific rationalism. The idea here is to undermine imaginary realities by revealing the ‘true’ reality – that of materiality. In the context of Putumaya, a counter-discourse of this type might take the form of a scientific argument that “the indigenes are fundamentally and biologically identical to the colonizers—the only differences  being cultural and linguistic—and there is no irreducible distinction between the two groups.” This kind of scientific counter-discourse would be aimed at undermining the culture of terror that conceives of the indigene as a distinct, non-human entity (eg. the auca, who is perceived as being part-beast). The strategy behind such scientific counter-discourses is to eliminate the epistemic and ontological uncertainty surrounding the encounter – to relocate the encounter outside of the space of death.

Taussig thinks these kinds of counter-discourses are doomed to fail. Instead of challenging the terrorizing phantasmagoria by attempting to unveil the materiality behind the shadows, Taussig argues that an effective counter-discourse needs to insert a different phantasmagoria; one that allows for peaceful relations. A phantasmagoria that “perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.” In other words, the only way to challenge fascist poetics is with what might be called a poetics of wonder; a poetics that is non-combative and non-imperial. I am very sympathetic to this idea, since I think that the strategy of replacing discursive imaginaries with scientific rationalism opens up the door to further antagonisms (Nazi science is a perfect example of biologico-fascist poetics).

Ewen Macaskill and Gabriel Dance’s article “NSA Files Decoded. What the Revelations Mean for You” provides a commentary on a different historical culture of terror: the culture of “national security” that arose following September 11, 2001. The space of death out of which the culture of terror emerged was the epistemic uncertainty surrounding the identity, intentions, capabilities, location, and affiliations of the perpetrators. I’ll end this short essay by fleshing out the analogy between Putumayo and the post-9/11 world. If we agree with this comparison, and we accept that the national security discourse that gave rise to the Patriot Act and the NSA is indeed a culture of terror, then it would seem that the “savage” of Putumayo has been symbolically transfigured into the “terrorist” of today. Those who live within the phantasmagoria of the War on Terror experience the imaginary “terrorist” as a non-human evil; a savage demon waiting to destroy them and end their civilization at any moment. They come to know this “terrorist” through modern-day muchachos – the reporters, specialists, government agencies, and ‘insiders’ who claim some special knowledge of this shadowy figure, while simultaneously fueling and confirming the dominant narratives and discourse. The citizens living within this new culture of terror, like their colonial counterparts, impulsively arm themselves with the inhumane brutality they feel is necessary to militant against and protect themselves from this inhuman Other. In this reading of the War on Terror, the atrocities committed by the colonizers in Putumayo reemerge—both in prison camps like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, as well as in mainstream American society. The NSA’s violation of the civil rights of hundreds of millions of people is society’s collective response to the demonic threat of terrorism.